“Obama pines for a social media Ministry of Truth,” notes the video producer Western Lensman. Our former president recently said, “We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts.” Preventing a diversity of facts, he said, “will require some government regulatory constraints.” Obama criticized what he sees as a social media business model “that elevates the most hateful voices” and “the most polarizing voices.” Coming up with appropriate regulatory constraints “is going to be a big challenge for all of us that we’re going to have to undertake,” Obama said.
In practice, “Diversity of facts” = “facts I don’t like”, notes Western Lensman. “‘Diversity of facts’ is how authoritarians justify censorship Free societies don’t outsource truth to government regulators. Once the state becomes the arbiter of information, dissent becomes disinformation,” observes TechSignals.
Obama made these comments during an appearance on The Connecticut Forum’s “An Evening with President Barack Obama.”
Letting the government dictate what is true or false is dangerous, because the government itself regularly lies, and is not a reliable arbiter of the truth. President Obama occasionally told lies himself, such as about the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Ledbetter and Citizens United cases.
The U.S. Supreme Court said in Thomas v. Collins, that “every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”
Obama’s comments echo the stances taken the Democratic candidates in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz:
At the vice presidential debate [on October 1, 2024], Tim Walz backed curbs on “hate speech” and misinformation, wrongly believing they are not protected by the First Amendment — even though most hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and most disinformation is protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court explained in NAACP v. Button (1963), the First Amendment protects speech regardless of its “truth, popularity, or social utility.” Yet, Kamala Harris has called for the Justice Department to crack down on “hate” and “misinformation.”
“Hate speech” and “misinformation” mean different things to different people. To taxpayer-funded disinformation experts — who tend to be progressive or left-wing –“disinformation” includes true facts that make people think bad thoughts. For example, it includes facts that give people an “adversarial attitude” toward “democratic institutions” — that is, organs of the government — or minority groups, according to the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index.
For example, the Global Disinformation Index classified a factually-accurate blog post by a black lawyer as “white supremacy content” and “disinformation” because it pointed out that the black crime rate is higher than the crime rate for other races. That factually-accurate blog post was characterized as white supremacist even though the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics has confirmed that the black crime rate is higher. Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. As the BJS noted in a later version of that same publication, Homicide Trends in the United States, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).
“Disinformation expert” tends to mean “progressive.” A Misinformation Review run out of Harvard University revealed that so-called disinformation “experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum,” with the largest fraction of them being “fairly left-wing,” and more of them being “very-left wing” than being centrist (none of them were right-wing, of course).
To many progressive officials — such as those who run our college campuses — “hate speech” includes stating facts, if they produce attitudes detrimental toward “historically victimized groups”, even if the statement of fact is not motivated by hatred. ‘Hate speech” is “broadly ‘defined’ by leftists to include ‘offensive words, about or directed towards historically victimized groups.’” “The concept of hate speech has expanded to include commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects. That includes criticizing feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, or gay marriage, or opinions about how to address sexual harassment or allegations of racism in the criminal justice system.”
But there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court observed in Matal v. Tam (2017), “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
